Game developer Bennett Foddy was watching a Greek myth unfold in front of him. A playtester for his latest project, Baby Steps, was struggling to navigate the game’s lead—Nate, a 35-year-old “failson” in a stained onesie—up a slippery hill. Each time, the terrain proved to be too much, and Nate skidded uselessly down it. Foddy has a reputation for making onerous games that take a little bit of masochism to master. This was not one of those times. Neatly placed next to the slippery hill was a staircase, which Foddy says the player took note of after the third or fourth fall. However, this modern-day Sisyphus refused to quit; he continued to flop Nate’s thick limbs up that hill again and again, and he continued to fall again and again. The playtester’s “intense need to climb that mudslide—it's funny to me, it's gratifying as a designer,” says Foddy. “I loved that he was doing it. Like, that's not productive.” Unbeknownst to the playtester, he was Foddy's target audience. Baby Steps, launching September 23 for PlayStation 5 and PC, entreats gamers to examine how much they unconsciously adhere to damaging masculine ideas, including an unwillingness to appear weak or incapable, whether that’s in how well they play a game or how willing they are to sometimes take the L. It makes its hero less like the muscled protagonists of games past and more like the players: unhelpfully stubborn types with what Foddy calls "slightly problematic" views of what it means to succeed that are actually holding them back. Baby Steps is a failure-to-launch story with an Isekai twist, as Nate is transported from the safety of his parents’ basement couch to an unfamiliar land. In trailers for the game, it’s easy to see what Foddy means. Nate lacks any semblance of a so-called man’s man. He’s awkward, unkempt, and overweight. He fumbles his words and can barely even walk without falling over; players control Nate by literally moving one leg at a time, controls reminiscent of ragdoll runner QWOP, the game that put Foddy on the map. Baby Steps players will likely spend much of their time tumbling off cliffs or pratfalling down gentle hills. From the start, Foddy says, Nate is offered help by someone who wants to teach him the ropes, give him a pair of shoes, maybe even a map. “And he can't accept that help,” Foddy says. “To me, that's a joke about a kind of symbolic masculine self-sufficiency and the limitations of that.” Foddy’s body of work has always been about difficulty and failure; Baby Steps is asking players to consider why they subject themselves to this sort of pain needlessly. In video games, capital M masculinity has long been the standard for male leads: a (typically white) confident protagonist in good shape, demonstrating unusual strength in a hero role. The idea that games are made by men, for men, has been so pervasive in the history of video games that it’s prompted entire harassment campaigns targeting anyone who doesn’t fit that description. More extreme examples include pockets of online gaming culture where toxic communities persistently reject anyone they deem as “DEI”—women, people of color, marginalized communities—to uphold sexist and racist ideologies.